100 favourite songs: #40: "Right In Time" - Lucinda Williams

This song gives me a rush — it’s as simple as that. All taut, yearning verses and then surging, lingering choruses, “Right In Time” could (and sometimes, when I think about these things, does) exemplify everything I like about this whole alt-country thing for which I fell so whole-heartedly over the course of last year. On this song — on the whole of the album from which it comes, Car Wheels On A Gravel Road, really — Williams completely blows any limiting conceptions of ‘country’ or ‘rock’ out of the water, making music which wears its antecedents proudly on its sleeve and takes the best elements of both streams in winding up somewhere else altogether, somewhere profoundly American and deeply universal, restless travellers on dusty highways under endless skies, the wind in one’s hair and sun in one’s eyes. Like I said, it gives me a rush.